World

Pollution Is to Climate Change as Smoking Is to Cancer, Report Says

Workers cycle past a coal-fired power plant on a tricycle cart in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province on Dec. 17, 2010. The world's emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide took the biggest jump on record, calculated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Climate scientists have tried nearly every possible tactic in their arsenal to get the public to both recognize the reality of manmade climate change, and act to prevent the worst potential consequences. Yet public opinion polls continue to show that Americans view this issue near the bottom of their priorities.

Scientists have written voluminous technical research reports, aimed at influencing policy makers (another one comes out later this month). They have published studies aimed at more general audiences, and some, like former NASA scientist James Hansen, have taken an activist bent, participating in acts of civil disobedience to call attention to the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, for example.

Now comes yet another climate report, this time from the largest scientific society in the world — the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, or AAAS, which claims 120,000 individual members. This report, entitled “What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change” is not a one-off report, most of which are forgotten about within days.

Instead, the report and its companion multimedia website marks the launch of a campaign that will include events around the country as well as briefings with lawmakers.

The 800,000 year history of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, showing the huge spike in the past century.

Image: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The report, prepared by 13 scientists and spearheaded by Nobel Prize Winning chemist Mario Molina and James McCarthy, a climate researcher at Harvard University, does not contain any new findings on climate change. But it is unique in that it frames the issue as one of risk management, equating it with insurance policies, and strongly states the level of agreement among experts in plain language that one would never find in, say, a report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports are massive, and highly technical, making them virtually inaccessible to a lay person or most policy makers.

The report describes scientists' confidence in the relationship between manmade greenhouse gases and global warming as being "analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases."

In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday morning, the authors said they decided to write the report based on a recognition that an organized disinformation campaign sponsored in large part by the fossil fuel industry, as well as other less nefarious factors, have prevented many Americans from recognizing that there is broad agreement within the scientific community that manmade climate change is both real and is a growing threat.

Credit: AAAS

For example, the report cites polling data from 2013 that found that only 42% of Americans understood that most scientists agree that global warming is happening.

“The public has been misinformed by colossal disinformation campaigns to the point where they think that within climate science there is a lot of debate about whether the earth is warming,” McCarthy said.

“We also realize that we haven’t been very effective in communicating beyond our scientific communities,” he said, describing most scientific assessments of climate change as “ponderous.”

“One more study won’t necessarily convince people,” McCarthy told Mashable in an interview. “[But] as professionals we feel we have a duty to tell people what we know."

The report likens the risk of massive and abrupt climate change, for which there is no precedent in modern human history, to a low risk, high-impact event such as the financial crisis of 2008.

The report says:

We had no history of intertwined real estate and financial markets to draw on, and few experts recognized the risk indicators that led to enormous and rapid economic consequences. It is no surprise that we use a metaphor like bursting bubbles for such highly damaging financial events. We do not recognize we are in one; things seem stable, until suddenly they are not.”

The report emphasizes two key points that scientists are well aware of, but that the public may not know. The first is that scientific uncertainty cuts both ways, meaning that it may turn out to be the case that global warming is worse than feared, and that increasing air and ocean temperatures set off abrupt changes in Earth’s systems. “Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system,” the report says.

The "What We Know" report also focuses on the conclusion of most economists who have studied climate change policy options, which is that it is far cheaper to take action now versus waiting for more severe consequences to become apparent. “Waiting to take action will inevitably increase costs, escalate risk, and foreclose options to address the risk,” the report says.

Now that the report has been published, the big question will be whether anyone will pay attention to it. If the past is prologue, there is little reason to believe it will make a major difference in the public debate about climate science and policy. But the scientists who wrote it are determined to keep trying.

Mashable
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